SEO Tips That the Experts Don’t Always Tell You!

Many Search Engine Optimization (SEO) consultants and companies have theories about the best SEO tactics, but they don’t always back them up with proven experiments.

I came across one company from Canada which took SEO optimisation into their own hands and learned through experience and extensive testing a few proven ways to boost Google’s rankings of your website.

1. Encourage other sites to link to yours – this may be a well known strategy but it can’t be reinforced enough. Consider joining forces with other companies in your industry “food chain” offering to add a link of their site on your webpage in exchange for a link of your site on their webpage.

2. Leverage Social Bookmarking – Google trusts sites more if visitors bookmark them. The growth of social bookmarking services, such as Del.icio.us or StumbleUpon, makes this relatively easy to do. Install the “Add This” button on each web page so visitors can bookmark your site easily.

3. Post videos that are relevant to search terms – YouTube has proven that video is a powerful attention grabber. It doesn’t have to be fancy or high-budget. A simple 30-90 sec “how to” video that’s relevant to your search term can have a big impact on your SEO optimization.

4. Keep Google in the loop – consider sending Google an XML sitemap which shows your site’s coding each time you make an update. Google will help you correct any errors in your sitemap to make its indexing more accurate and will crawl your site more often if you routinely send it sitemap updates.

5. Optimise each page to a search term – if you have titled all of your title tags the same then Google is less likely to realize you have a page full of content for someone searching for information on, say, “small business infrastructure.” By putting a search term in each title tag this allows you to focus the content of each page and labeling on specific keywords.

6. Have photos and label them – a web page with a photo relevant to a given search will outrank the same page without one, providing you label the photo with the appropriate tag. For example, “small_business_bookkeeping.jpg” instead of a digital camera’s default “123.jpg” will be more effective. As well, be sure to run the same keywords in the “alt text” tag that lets you describe the image for the visually impaired. So many leave these tags blank, but Google indexes them and rewards pages on which a search term appears more often.

There you have it. These simple suggestions have been proven by one company in Canada and I’m sure they could work for every small business interested in getting their site to the top of the Google search listings!

13 Responses to “ SEO Tips That the Experts Don’t Always Tell You! ”

1. Evans
   
   Said on February 25th, 2010 at 12:06 am

   Well my seo company doesn’t tell me anything they say that they are working on it. It’s been a few months but my website’s page rank haven’t improved yet.

2. David
   
   Said on February 25th, 2010 at 10:59 am

   Hi Stefan

   One tip I find pays dividends with Google is to do plenty of keyword research. Find keywords that are relevant to the subject of your site. Then write articles and create pages on your website that are optimised for those keywords.

   Great blog by the way!

3. Nicholas Kemp
   
   Said on February 25th, 2010 at 2:59 pm

   Other SEO tactics include article writing, setting up a Google Knol and on-page factors.

4. Adrian Swinscoe
   
   Said on February 26th, 2010 at 1:44 pm

   Hi Stefan,
   Just subscribed to ScribeSEO (not a plug) for my blog and its making me more aware of how to write more SEO-optimised content.

   It’s something that I wasn’t fully aware of but hopefully should make my content more search engine friendly. I’d recommend any bloggers out there to get ahold of a tool to help with this. Saves a lot of time.

   Adrian

5. Mick Johnson
   
   Said on February 28th, 2010 at 12:20 pm

   I still think that many small businesses are spending a lot of money on big SEO campaigns when perhaps they don’t need to. We’ve done a few experiments with sites just targeting ‘local’ search traffic (when someone searches for say ‘plumbers in my town’) and have found that good on-page seo is more than enough for a first page listing (if not top). Sure, if you’re going for competitive terms like ’shoe shops’ then big seo is a must – but the seo needs to reflect the need. For me, the biggest seo tip is get your page text right!!

6. Nicole Welsh
   
   Said on March 2nd, 2010 at 6:44 pm

   Nice Article! I have been thinking past few days that google has lowered down the weightage of linking sites. Let me know your views.

7. Thad
   
   Said on March 4th, 2010 at 4:30 am

   One of the most overlooked SEO factors that I find common among clients’ websites is the lack of content that is search engine friendly. Small businesses will load their web pages up with photos of products without realizing that the search engines cannot read the photos. They need more text on a page.

   If you want to make it easier for a page to rank well, then you really need to try to get at least a couple hundred words of relevant text on the page. You can get away with less. However, the more properly organized text you have on the page, the easier it will be to get your page to rank well in Google.

8. Albie Saunderson
   
   Said on March 8th, 2010 at 3:19 pm

   Mick is right, local search can be very useful for small businesses. This type of traffic is often more targetted than going for the larger volume keywords anyway and can leas to better conversions / leads etc.

9. Ken
   
   Said on March 9th, 2010 at 9:59 pm

   Hi Stefan!
   Some good recommendations in your article, and in the helpful comments which have followed. Thank you.
   I would recommend to keep a website content friendly to both search engines and humans, with good, quality content (over quantity of content) and add some related images, charts/graphs, videos, links to more detailed reference information, but not make your articles/posts too long. Take care.

10. Keith Lewis
    
    Said on March 9th, 2010 at 10:13 pm

    Your linking strategy will not get you far with Google page ranking. Google likes one way links so encouraging people to link to you in exchange for a link back will hurt you both. You would be better served with anchor links from blogs or press releases or create backlinks with classified ads sites.

11. Jack
    
    Said on March 17th, 2010 at 5:55 pm

    I good SEO has nothing to hide. Trying to keep information to yourself so no one can find out is kinda of premature from my perspective. If a client wanted to do it themselves they wouldn’t have came to me. And without a consulting fee we don’t have time to provide tons of information. Full transparency is a great thing in my view.

12. Tim Hind
    
    Said on March 23rd, 2010 at 3:36 pm

    great advice about using keywords to identify images. Being a wedding photographer i have a lot of images in my website. I’ll start renaming them.

    Is their a limit to the number of times you should use particular keywords?

13. keith
    
    Said on March 24th, 2010 at 6:45 pm

    some good helpful bits there, some i already knew but now i will be looking into some other areas.

    Thank you

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